I stumbled across this photo in an old Tiffany’s box in our attic in Iowa City today. I believe it’s circa 2005. NYC SoHo.
My best friend from childhood Melina Bloomfield moved to NY in the late ‘90’s and I followed suit in 2000. Melina and I were riding bicycles through SoHo and we went up four stories in an elevator to a darkened big room that had lotsa velvet and an piles of fruit and scantily clad liberated women dressed in lingerie, a dozen bejeweled Courtesans as Mama Gena would call them, a harmen of Salomes. We were ostensibly there to say hello to Melina’s friend Jenn who worked for the New York Times. I can’t remember the story this photo shoot went with. We were welcome interlopers, crashing their party. Everyone was in festive spirits, jiggling their cellulite, erupting in the joyousness of the feminine body in all its marvelous sizes. Melina’s bi and was squealing with delight the whole time. Melina’s favorite exclamation back then was “Oh my Goddess!”
I moved to Iowa City a few years ago and stumbled upon
Melissa Febos’ book Body Work which I devoured and bought a half dozen copies of to give to friends. I want women and specifically young women to know their bodies are theirs. Their pleasure is theirs. They own their pussies, their conjuring pussies.I went to an Iowa Writers’ Workshop event last March for Melissa’s class. The class was giving an award to Deaf Blind essayist John Lee Clarke and Melissa wasn’t there. Womp. Womp. She was doing a sabbatical in Tuscany. ‘Must be nice to escape the Iowa winters’ I thought.
This winter I met sweet Melissa at the big writers’ conference AWP in February in Kansas City. I didn’t have anything to say to her. I stood in line after her panel and said that I love her books and I live in Iowa City. I wanted to say “Can we be friends?” but I suffer from thinking I’m not cool enough to hang out with cool people, so I said nothing and walked away. Maybe in my next life I won’t suffer from shyness and social anxiety and I’ll be able to make friends with cool people. But as Philip Seymour Hoffman said in Almost Famous “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.”
So here’s to the uncool. The awkward. The misfits. The underdogs who have never fit it, no matter how hard we tried because fitting in is a lie. I belong because I say I belong, not because someone let me in the club. Peel me a grape.